One thing I did for Webstock was I started Twittering again. Basically, it was a pretty sweet deal, because I felt like I was part of the elite Webstock underground, getting @replies from people I’d never met. But in the days since, I think I’ve picked up on why I left Twitter in the first place, and replaced it (essentially) with updates to my Facebook status:

Twitter can’t grammar.

Basically, the crux of the problem is this: Twitter’s central premise, the form label that became a tagline (or vice versa), asks a question. Twitter’s homepage phrases it like this:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Which is fine. But say I answer that question, sensibly enough, with “ranting about Twitter on my blog”. My status is subsequently displayed as follows:

@fauxparse ranting about Twitter on my blog less than 20 seconds ago from web

If I change it, accordingly, to ”is ranting about Twitter on his blog”, then my brain balks, because I’m not answering the question. Also, though, and more pressingly, if I am looking at my status when I am not logged in (which, of course, is the natural state for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population), I get an endless string of:

• is ranting about Twitter on his blog
• is eating a delicious bagel
• is trying to resist the urge to include the phrase “chunky bacon” in a spurious example
• …

…all without the username attached. Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, just looks silly; and that’s before you start adding @replies and the like.

Now, there are a lot of things that are similarly wrong with Facebook (and that’s just at an interface level, but whatever); compare, however, their approach to status updates:

Matt Powell is ranting about Twitter on his blog.

There is (well, there used to be) a compulsory verb, ‘is’, which sets (set) the voice of the whole piece. My name is always displayed. All the updates from my friends follow a similar structure, in the third-person present continuous.

Facebook recently caved to pressure and removed the compulsory ‘is’, but it’s still clearly the preferred option, at least officially. If your last status started with ‘is’, and you click to change it, the ‘is’ isn’t deleted when you start typing, and is thus kind of a default for your new status (this is perhaps one of the interface things they’re not so great at). But hey, they could make that change because status updates aren’t their entire concept.

So, uh, solutions? Just looking at my recent ‘friends’ timeline, the people I follow on Twitter fall into a few distinct categories:

• ‘answering the question’ style
• ‘third person’ style
• posting complete sentences, irrespective of the presence or otherwise of the username

I guess I am going to try going with the ‘third person’ style for a while. Try it on, see how it fits, you know. It’s just frustrating that there isn’t a clear, consistent solution.

Edit: Nope, tried it. Too weird.